[FRIAM] Guided Apophenia

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

SteveS wrote,

 

  FriAM, for better and worse, is a "Living Batch", a symbiotic colony of organisms....

 

So, I guess it’s up to me to eat all the academic cake myself.  Would that I were able! As Eric will point out, I can’t even eat my own slice. 

 

Nick 

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2020 11:48 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Guided Apophenia

 

Continuing on the arc, I stumbled over this paper ( a more scholarly, less PopSci) on meta-issues of the "Extended Mind Hypothesis" 

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-015-0799-9

This is relevant for multiple reasons but the most obvious to me in the moment is the ideas SteveG has promoted around Collective Intelligence and in some ways the "Extended Phenotype" (in Dawkin's sense), the built environment, and direly the latest application of Kauffman's Adjacent Possible to the exponentially growing (in complexity if not material resource) technosphere (on top of/adjacent to the noosphere on top of the biosphere on top of the hydro-cryo-atmo-geosphere).   It is a "technicolor goo" parallel to the "grey goo" scenario.

My application domain(s) include the realm of distributed collaboration (nominally scientific) and of "becoming collectively intelligent" in the sense of the distributed camera systems (and beyond) in-process at SimTable.

Your response below is well received and nicely arcs/ties back to the other threads we are all weaving here in our collective co-evolution of ideas.  This is my response to Nick's desire to capture all of this and reshape (back-propogate/re-project?) it into scholarly papers.   I sense that such a goal is an OldSkool impulse which I do not mean as dismissive, but possibly mutually exclusive to the process we are collectively engaged in here (what I think of as the Buddhist (westernized version) concept of dependent co-arising).   FriAM, for better and worse, is a "Living Batch", a symbiotic colony of organisms....

<not> Mumble/Ramble,

 - Steve

On 11/12/20 10:14 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:

Excellent question! My obviously non-compelling contributions to the recent AI-polling thread  <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/How-soon-until-AI-takes-over-polling-tp7599471p7599481.html> <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/How-soon-until-AI-takes-over-polling-tp7599471p7599481.html> were intended to evoke ideas like those expressed here:
 
A Question of Responsibility by John Collins
https://www.academia.edu/177687/A_Question_of_Responsibility
 
E.g. "Chomsky’s general point in this passage, I take it, is that the empirical coverage of any theoretical discourse can be rendered as a commitment to a set of the relevant entities ([...]). Such ontological commitment to the sets of the relevant entities, however, is not required for the explanatory goals of the given sciences, unless, of course, the science is a branch of mathematics that is concerned with large sets and their properties, and there the identity of the entities is irrelevant."
 
If we imagine the output of an ML inducer as a just-so-story (similar to Kepler's laws) and an identified mechanism (similar to Newton's laws), it argues for something like inference to the best explanation. Sloppy IttBE can easily lead to "conspiracy theory". But well-done IttBE is simply good science. The *difference* lies in the well-done. Enter orgs like Pro Publica, contrasted with your crazy Aunt poking around Facebook.
 
I *think* EricC was trying to make a point like this in his last response in the deductive fidelity thread. I still owe a response to that. But the idea that believable rhetoric needs something like *coherence* ... not as formal or strong as consistency, but something like it. And the point I made in my 2nd AI-polling post is that it not only matters that your argument hang together. The mechanics of the logic matter. It's the *method* that makes the difference.
 
On 11/12/20 8:44 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

Your reference to the little evidence, etc. leads me to another new word
I encountered: "Aeteology" in the tongue-in-cheek usage of your own
oft-lobbed "just so stories".   Is there any difference between a "just
so story" and "a conspiracy?".   Intent?  Consequence? 
Convergence/Divergence?

 
 

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